North America Epigenetics Market Growth, Trends and Forecasts (2016-2021)

Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression caused by certain base pairs in DNA, or RNA, being "turned off" or "turned on" again, through chemical reactions. In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is mostly the study of heritable changes that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence; to a lesser extent, epigenetics also describes the study of stable, long-term alterations in the transcriptional potential of a cell that are not necessarily heritable. The term also refers to the changes themselves: functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve a change in the nucleotide sequence. Examples of mechanisms that produce such changes are DNA methylation and histone modification, each of which alters how genes are expressed without altering the underlying DNA sequence.

The North American epigenetics market valued as a 3.68 billion USD market in 2016 is expected to show a very high growth and is expected to become a 7.43 billion USD market by 2021 showing a CAGR as high as 23.22%.

The epigenetics market is basically segmented into three categories mainly on the basis of mechanism, applications and geography. The mechanism sector can be segmented into three different categories mainly DNA Methylation, RNA Interference and Histone Modifications. The application segment can again be divided into categories such as Therapeutics and Research & Diagnostics. On the basis of geography the market is divided into North America, Europe, APAC and the rest of the world.

The major drivers for the growth of this market are the high incidence of cancer rate, wide range of applications it has and the increasing investment and funds to this field of science. The major challenges faced by epigenetics are the lack of reimbursement policy and the lack of predictive markers.

The major players in this field are  Celgene, Covaris, Epizyme, Merck Millipore and Ribimed Technologies.